Koltnow: Real Google doesn't mean real giggles

June 12, 2013

Updated Aug. 21, 2013 1:17 p.m.

Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson were so excited to have Google's permission to film on the tech company's campus for their new comedy "The Internship" that they forgot the comedy.PHOTO BY TWENTIETH CENTURY FOX

However, it is entirely appropriate to make jokes in a movie that is supposed to be a comedy.

This may explain some of the problems with the "The Internship."

If you are as obsessed with box office numbers as we are, you probably know that Hollywood is all abuzz over last weekend's performance of the Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson alleged comedy. I use the term "alleged" because there is no hard evidence that this was intended to be a comedy.

The movie came in a disappointing fourth in its opening weekend, behind the low-budget thriller "The Purge" and two holdovers, "Fast & Furious 6" and "Now You See Me."

Although billed as a comedy, "The Internship" felt more like an infomercial for Google.

Or worse, it could more aptly be described as a drama, which is not how a comedy wants to be described.

I really hate it when I'm right, but I hinted in a story last week that "The Internship" might face adversity at the box office because it takes itself too seriously. I suggested that it resembled what Hollywood disdainfully refers to as a "message movie."

Message movies are box office poison. Nobody wants to be lectured to at the movies. Nobody wants to learn anything at the movies. That's why they invented schools. If learning was supposed to be fun in the dark with tubs of buttery popcorn, teachers would look like Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie.

I warned director Shawn Levy that his movie might have a message, and he didn't flinch. He even boasted that "The Internship" had something to say. I knew he was in trouble when he said that.

I apologize. I have been discussing "The Internship" as if you had seen it, and we know by the weak box office numbers that you probably have not seen it.

The big draw was the reunion of Vaughn and Wilson after their 2005 hit "Wedding Crashers." That film, in case you've forgotten, was an actual comedy with a lot of laughs and no messages.

In "The Internship," Vaughn and Wilson traded in their law practice for failing careers as watch salesmen. They are described as "analog men in a digital age," and they soon are digitally downsized right out of their analog jobs. You can see the potential for big laughs in an atmosphere of recession and massive layoffs.

Anyway, they decide to apply for internships at tech giant Google. Although the company usually picks young genius types for its internship program, they inexplicably accept two unqualified middle-age watch salesmen. But if it wasn't for illogic, there would be no basis for movie comedy.

Director Levy told me that when Vaughn came to him with the idea for "The Internship," the filmmaker asked if Vaughn intended to enlist Google's cooperation in the venture, or use a fictional tech company. Vaughn insisted, and Levy seconded the notion, that it was Google or nothing.

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